Fiona Lensvelt

A modern mysticism

It seems like every person I meet is now a tarot reader or astrologer

I first met a tarot reader in a hotel lobby in central London on my birthday four years ago. I was a book critic at the time and was aware that the cards had inspired writers from W.B. Yeats to T.S. Eliot and Italo Calvino — perhaps there’s a novel in this, I thought. This was serious research. I was less interested in my destiny than I was in the way tarot worked.

That was just as well because no sooner had I sat down than my reader piped up: ‘This has been an especially trying time for you and I’m afraid that it isn’t going to get easier.’ She went on, at length, before I told her there wasn’t a great deal of drama in my life: I had a stable relationship, a good job, family and friends who supported me. Was she confusing my past with my present? She was unrelenting: no, I was about to encounter the lowest point in my life and should be prepared for trouble ahead.

Happy birthday to me. I could have got more wisdom communing with the spirits cabinet. It may not have been the most cheering (or cheapest) of experiences, yet a few days later I couldn’t get the reading out of my head. It wasn’t because of what was said but because of the cards themselves. On the table were mythical images, threaded with Christian and pagan symbolism that drew me into a world of kings and queens, hanged men, magicians, devils and women who tame lions. Plots, characters, actions — my reading may not have been particularly accurate but this mythic world was captivating.

There was a power that stuck with me in the reading: stripped of the fortune-telling, what this reader was doing was telling me a story about my life and placing me at the centre of it.

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